A portrait of the filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. The film proposes a journey through his cinema marked by the recent history of Chile. From The Battle of Chile, a masterpiece of direct cinema recounting the last months of Salvador Allende and the Chilean Popular Unity to Nacre Button, still a project but filmed as it is coming into being, Patricio Guzmán discloses what he is and what his vision of the cinema is: “I can summarize Nostalgia for the Light in four sentences. But the film lasts 90 minutes. There are long moments during which I have to describe, and to describe is to pull something out of thin air. From reality. Sometimes you have to pull out something interesting, something alive, from a reality that has no beauty at all. That’s the hardest thing. I’ve always tried to find the formula, or to understand what is ‘describing.’ If I hadn’t experienced a coup d’état and a national tragedy that would last a century, perhaps I would have made films that were... lighthearted. I would have been a very different director.” DBA’s catalogue
D, G, E: Boris Nicot
S: Mathieu Descames, Laurent Thomas
P: Gérald Collas
CP: INA
INA. Michèle Gautard
T +33 1 4983 2992 E mgautard@ina.fr
W ina.fr
Born in 1974, he lives and works in Southern France. He studied at the School of Fine Arts and participated in several artist collectives. He directed the experimental documentary shorts Asile (2005) and D’assez courtes unités de temps (2008) as well as the feature-length documentary Un étrange équipage (2010).
